THE OPEN SHOP FOR CULTURE
While we are in Massachusetts, let us have a look at its second city,
Worcester, the manufacturing center of the metal trades, and “open shop”
headquarters of New England. We have studied this “open shop” system in
Southern California, and it will be interesting to note some further
evidence of the unity of the United States.
What does the term “open shop” mean? It means that a place is “open” to
unorganized wage-slaves, and closed to union men; as corollary to this,
it means a universal spy system, with the beating, jailing and deporting
of union organizers. That there are factories in which the employers
maintain such conditions is bad enough; but when you have, as in
Worcester, an open shop city, the case is infinitely more serious. An
“open shop city” is a place where the organized employers apply to a
whole community those tactics of terrorism which they have learned
inside their factory gates; so that the “open shop” becomes not merely
the industrial policy, but the philosophy and religion and morality of
two hundred thousand human beings.
The Black Hand of Worcester is known as the Metal Trades Association. It
has a whole group of subsidiary propaganda organizations, the Chamber of
Commerce, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Economic Club. It has
two kept newspapers, the “Telegram” and the “Gazette,” also a smaller
paper, the “Post,” controlled by the Catholics. There is a large Irish
population, also a French-Canadian population, to which the open shop is
handed down as the will of the Pope. The Protestant God thunders
actively through the mouths of fashionable clergymen, who denounce labor
unionism and Socialism, not merely in sermons, but in illustrated
lectures in colleges and schools, their denunciations being reprinted in
the next day’s newspapers.
At the top of the educational system of this Black Hand is Clark
University, once a center of America’s feeble intellectual life. I have
told in two chapters of “The Goose-step” the story of this university’s
collapse. I will restate briefly: one of the trustees, Mr. Thurber,
general manager of Ginn & Company, school-book publishers, discovered an
opportunity to boost the sales of the Frye-Atwood Elementary
Geographies, and selected as the new president of Clark University and
Clark College the author of these masterpieces, who proceeded to open in
the institutions enormous geographical and geological and
physiographical and anthropographical and anthropogeological
and physicoanthropological and geophysicogeographical and
anthropophysicogeological departments, institutes, summer schools,
chautauquas, and correspondence schools, at which teachers and
superintendents of the United States are assembled, winter and summer,
to meet the book writers and book agents of Ginn & Company, with Mrs.
Helen Goss Thomas, head of the geographical division of Ginn & Company,
graciously pouring the tea.
It happened that Scott Nearing was lecturing at Clark University on the
control of American colleges by the plutocracy, and President Atwood
came in to hear him, and being dissatisfied with the proofs he quoted,
and wishing to furnish more conclusive proofs, got up in the middle of
the lecture and ordered Scott Nearing off the platform and out of the
hall. This was the greatest triumph of plutocracy in American
educational history, and all Worcester rose with a yell and hailed
President Atwood as the saviour of the learned world. The Rotary Club
gave him a banquet, welcoming him with such uproar that the newspaper
reporters had to admit their best eloquence inadequate. The Economic
Club elected him president for the new year, the superintendent of
schools sang his praises, and the clergy ordered special anthems.
Nor were more substantial rewards forgotten; I inspect a list of the
text-books used in the public schools of Worcester for the year after
the Nearing incident, and I discover that in the high schools there are
forty-two text-books of Ginn & Company, in the elementary schools
twenty, in the supplementary reading list thirty-five, a total of
ninety-seven books—and, needless to say, under the heading of
“Geography” we find “Frye’s New Geography, Book I, (Frye-Atwood
Series),” and also “New Geography, Book II, Atwood, (Frye-Atwood
Series).”
While we are on the subject, you will be interested to know of recent
developments at Clark University. The chapters in “The Goose-step”
evidently got under the skin of the alumni, for they appointed a
committee of three to investigate President Atwood’s administration. The
chairman of this committee was a young Catholic physician of Worcester,
having political ambitions. He looked into the matter, and assured a
number of the faculty members that he was going to make a report
condemning Atwood’s administration. But then he was summoned before the
Clark trustees, who are the big chiefs of Worcester’s Black Hand; and
his committee rendered a report which said that everything was just as
it should be. Mr. Thurber came out with a statement that “everything is
lovely at Clark”; and this at a time when the freshman class had been
reduced one-half, the graduate school had been reduced nearly
two-thirds, and the trustees were obliged to raise the tuition fifty per
cent in order to offset the decrease in income! They have now made plans
to drum up students for the next year, and have engaged one of the
foremost chautauqua artists, ventriloquists, magicians, and vocal
acrobats in New England, to lead the force of salesmen.
Also you will be amused to know that at the close of the last academic
year President Atwood summoned all those members of the faculty who were
his supporters, and asked them if they could suggest anything wrong
about his administration. One of the academic rabbits summoned courage
to make a squeak; he said the exclusion of the “Nation” and the “New
Republic” from the university library had done more than anything else
to injure the reputation of Clark. Whereupon the librarian flared up,
and declared that if either of these magazines were restored to the
library, he would resign. They have not been restored.
Instead of that, Clark University is sending out bulletins offering
“home study courses” to people who want to learn to talk about the
weather! You may think that just one of my hideous jokes, but here is
the “Supplement” for April, 1923, listing “Courses Now Ready,” and the
first course is entitled: “The Passing Weather.” Says the description:
“This course will prove of interest and value to all who wish to know
the simple, scientific facts which underlie that ever-present widely
discussed subject, the weather.” The advertisement goes on to explain
that “the person who finds pleasure in observing and anticipating the
ever-changing face of the sky will find this study interesting and
profitable.”
There remains to be mentioned a tragic incident. Among the faculty of
Clark who were in rebellion against the Atwood regime was Arthur Gordon
Webster, an internationally known scientist and physicist. Professor
Webster had been on the faculty for thirty years. I was advised to write
and ask him, in confidence, his ideas and conclusions. He wrote briefly,
but did not give me what I wanted, and I was told afterwards by some of
his colleagues that he was afraid to do so, and that the shame of his
position preyed upon his mind. Two months after “The Goose-step”
appeared, and while the faculty and student-body at Clark were
discussing the book, Professor Webster said to his students: “This is
the last time I shall address you from this platform—that is, for a long
time.” He wrote a note to his son, saying that his life had been a
failure; then he retired to his laboratory and put two bullets into his
head.
Let us now take up the training of the goslings of this open shop city.
There is the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with President Hollis, a
former naval officer and martial soul, who boasts that he is ready at
any time to place the entire student body of the Institute at the
disposal of the police to break strikes. (Last summer he loaned his own
daughters to break the strike of the underpaid telephone operators!) A
list of the trustees of this concern is a list of the Black Hand of
Massachusetts. At the head stands George I. Alden, president of the
state board of education, also president of the Norton Grinding Company,
a thoroughly feudal concern, which owns its workers’ homes, and
ruthlessly ferrets out every independent thought in their heads. Just
for fun, I will list the rest of these trustees by occupation, so that
you may see what a really plutocratic board can be when it tries.
The manager of the American Steel & Wire Company, another feudal
concern, whose special device is to avoid paying pensions by discharging
its old employes a year or two before they become eligible; a prominent
banker and member of this same concern; a prominent lumber dealer and
manufacturer; the head of the largest loom manufactory in the United
States, heavily interested in banks and in the two Worcester newspapers;
the head of the United States Envelope Company; a leading banker; the
president of a sprinkler company, a notorious reactionary; the treasurer
of the Norton Company; the vice-president and sales manager of a forge
company; the president of the White Motor Company; the president and
general manger of a pump machinery company; the vice-president and
superintendent of the shoe machinery trust; the vice-president of the
Westinghouse Electric Company; the manager of a tool manufacturing
concern; the vice-president of a scales company, president of two other
scales companies, chairman of a typewriter company, director of an
asbestos corporation, a cement company, two banks, a safety razor
company, an arms company, a finance and trading corporation, a guarantee
company, and a water power company; the treasurer of a construction
company; another magnate of the Norton Company; the vice-president of a
national bank; the president of a lumber company; another manufacturer;
the treasurer of another manufacturing company; and three
representatives of the open shop of Jesus Christ.
Let me give you also an illustration of what it means to run education
for such a board of magnificoes. The brother-in-law of one, an
interlocking director of manufacturing, banking, journalism and
hospitals, found himself with a son on his hands; and in the effort to
get this son through this institution he employed one of the
institution’s young instructors as a tutor. The son being unwilling to
take the trouble to visit the tutor, it was arranged that an automobile
should come each day to bring the tutor to the son. On one occasion
there turned up at the tutor’s door a large industrial truck of
unprepossessing appearance. As the tutor knew the garage of the great
magnate was stocked with motor cars of all kinds and sizes, he felt
himself injured in his dignity, and declined to climb aboard the
industrial truck. When the magnate learned of this, he was enraged, and
threatened the tutor—not merely with loss of the opportunity to tute,
but also with the loss of his position in the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute.
The tutor still remaining obstinate, the issue was carried to President
Hollis, who took the side of his instructor: how could a retired naval
officer preserve the proper strike-breaking spirit in his faculty, if
members of the faculty were required to ride alongside common workingmen
in industrial trucks? He refused to discharge the instructor—and this in
spite of the fact that the magnate threatened the institution with loss
of a big donation. The tutor stopped tuting, but went on instructing at
Worcester Polytechnic; and I take pleasure in recording this first
feeble sprout of academic dignity in the Open Shop for Culture.
Next in turn comes Worcester Academy, a preparatory school for young
plutocrats, correct, spiritual, and athletic; the principal a Rotary
Club educator, an ardent open shopper, who bars all liberal periodicals,
and rushed forward to denounce as “dissolute” those members of the Clark
faculty who opposed President Atwood. The grand duke of the board of
trustees is the president of a great construction company, and a leading
member of Worcester’s Black Hand. I might give you the complete list of
these plutocrats, but it would bore you, because it is the same kind of
thing as you have just read a minute ago.
Next, the Worcester State Normal School, an entirely innocuous and
thought-excluding institution, in which the Black Hand trains its
teachers. One of the students reports everyone ardent in support of
Atwood, everything correct and cautious—because the funds depend upon
the open shop magnates.
Next, Holy Cross College, a Jesuit school, where theology is queen of
the sciences and logic her chief handmaiden. The leading trustees are
prosperous Irish business men, lawyers and politicians. The institution
is prosperous, crowded with students, and has famous athletic teams,
noted for their bruising tendencies. Holy Cross graduates used to come
to Clark for graduate work, and express astonishment upon discovering
the existence of the sciences of economics and sociology. Whole new
vistas of mental activity would be opened up to them—which vistas have
now been closed by President Atwood.
Next, Assumption College, founded by the monks of the Augustinian order,
who were driven out of France some twenty years ago. Its trustees are
the leading business men and lawyers among the French-Canadian
population, and the ideas taught are those which were considered a
menace to the existence of the republic in France a generation ago, but
which are exactly appropriate to the medievalism of plutocratic New
England.
Finally the public schools. These are conducted by a “school committee,”
made up of leading representatives of the firm of God, Mammon & Company.
There used to be one professor of Clark University on this board, Frank
H. Hankins, an eminent sociologist, and it was his liberal ideas which
had a great deal to do with the decision of the Worcester plutocracy to
smash Clark. Now Professor Hankins and a dozen of his liberal colleagues
are gone, and the “school committee” is filled with semi-illiterates,
most of whom could not qualify to teach an elementary class in the
schools they control.
The Metal Trades Association, with the consent of this “school
committee,” sends circulars to the teachers, warning them of the dangers
of the closed shop, and of all modern ideas in history, civics and
economics. Two or three years ago they encouraged a series of inter-high
school debates on the open shop, taking it for granted that their side
would win. Of course it didn’t win—it never can where both sides are
heard. The secretary of the Black Hand was infuriated, and declared this
one more evidence of the prevalence of Bolshevism in the educational
world. Nearing and Watson’s “Economics” was first mutilated, and then
ousted altogether; the same fate befell the entirely conventional
text-book of Professor Thomson, because he stated that immigrants were
frequently brought in to get cheaper labor, and were frequently not well
treated.
The superintendent of schools in Worcester was, until recently, a
gentleman by the name of Gruver. He was a good-natured person, who tried
to keep friends with everybody; he made the mistake of recommending in a
newspaper interview the reading of Wells’ “Outline of History,” and from
that time he was doomed. He moved on, and his assistant took his place,
a gentleman by the name of Young, a special darling of the Worcester
plutocracy, and a special _bete noire_ of the Worcester teachers; a
meddlesome, domineering pedagogue, who delights in the exercise of
authority, and is never so happy as when he can order some passage
blacked out of a text-book, or can storm at some teacher for an
unplutocratic utterance.
Under the former superintendent a number of teachers studied diligently
in summer schools, acquiring special credits; they were promised a
hundred dollars increase in salary, as reward for ten years of such
labor. Superintendent Young has abolished this reward—and so the
teachers are “out of luck.” He has substituted an arrangement whereby
high school students are enabled to earn money, to the vast satisfaction
of the Worcester plutocracy. The boys and girls lose two weeks of their
school work, and in return have the educational experience of acting as
clerks in the Worcester department-stores during the holiday rush!
The Catholics are so strong that the “school committee” has had a
difficult time adjusting promotions to suit all parties. It used to be
arranged that executive positions were given alternately to the Knights
of Columbus and the Masons; but there developed a deadlock at the secret
sessions of the school committee—known to the populace as the “gum-shoe
meetings.” The Knights of Columbus were demanding a position out of
turn, and the Masons wouldn’t stand for it—so finally they compromised
by giving the position to a Jew! The Catholics had to be satisfied with
getting an uneducated blacksmith made assistant principal of a high
school; first he had been taken on to teach forge work in the manual
training department, and then, through his political pull, he became a
regular member of the faculty, and now assistant principal, on the way
to the top!
Equally powerful in Worcester education are the Rotarians and the
Kiwanis. Superintendent Young was chosen by the Rotarians to travel all
the way to California as their representative in a national convention;
his predecessor, Gruver, was president of the Kiwanis. This book will be
translated into a number of European languages, and my translators will
write to ask me about these strange words, which are not in any
dictionary. So pardon me while I explain that Rotarians and Kiwanis are
business men who have made money rapidly, and who meet together to
express their satisfaction with the city and the civilization which have
made possible their success. Being human, these men would like to make
the world better, if it could be done without interfering with business;
since it cannot be done, they proceed to make the world bigger, and more
like what it is.
How completely these men are divorced from the intellectual life, it
will be difficult for a European to imagine. They are bursting with
energy; but lacking contact with ideas, they are like engines whirling
in a vacuum, unconnected with driving shaft or gears. They assemble and
partake of luncheons and dinners in sumptuous hotels, and summon to them
preachers and teachers of all degrees, to tell them that they are the
ultimate product of evolution. Left to himself, a Rotarian or Kiwani
might now and then experience a gleam of humility; but intellectual men
accept their hospitality, and for the sake of promotion and pelf flatter
their mass-vanities and whip up their herd-emotions—and this surely is
what is meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost.